SOA in the Synapses

I am most interested in the space between the large domain standards efforts, NBIMS, oBIX, GridWise, and OGC. When two areas of the brain try to interact, the action is all at the synapses. It is at the synapses that new ideas are formed, and that new actions are embarked upon.

The organizing principles of the synapses are what IT calls the architecture. We posit that we want each instance of these domains to hide their internal procedures, and offer up a surface. That surface should be defined not in terms of the underlying procedures, but as services. The architecture for linking these big domains together, then, is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different owners. It is natural to think of one person’s needs being met by capabilities offered by someone else; or, in the world of distributed computing, one computer agent’s requirements being met by a computer agent belonging to a different owner. There is not necessarily a one-to-one correlation between needs and capabilities; the granularity of needs and capabilities vary, and any given need may require the combining of numerous capabilities while any single service may address more than one need.

SOA provides a framework for matching needs and capabilities and for combining capabilities to address those needs. The purpose of using a capability is to realize one or more real world effects. In SOA, an interaction is “an act” as opposed to “an object” and the result of an interaction is an effect (or a set/series of effects). This effect may be the return of information or the change in the state of entities that are involved in the interaction.

Under SOA, people and organizations, and in my world, embedded systems offer capabilities and act as service providers. Those who make use of services are referred to as service consumers. The service description allows prospective consumers to decide if the service is suitable for their current needs and establishes whether a consumer satisfies any requirements of the service provider.

SOA is scalable because it makes the fewest possible assumptions about the network and also minimizes any trust assumptions that are often implicitly made in smaller scale systems. The Architect who uses SOA principles is better equipped to develop systems that are scalable, evolvable and manageable.

As Don Box once said, “SOAP was designed to let computers surf the web for data the way people surf the web for eye candy." With SOA, they are able to negotiate and interact as well.

Anyone interested on SOA would do well to read the OASIS Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture

 http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=soa-rm

Synapses between the Standards.

There are several large fat standards, or possibly standards of standards, that are struggling to be born right now. These large standards deal with capital assets and the way we describe and interact with them. These standards deal with energy and how we use it. These standards describe things that grew up before the effects of IT on how we look at systems. Now, they are learning to interact with the world of information.

I am more interested in the space between these standards. Just as in two areas of the brain trying to interact, the action is all at the synapses. It is at the synapses that new ideas are formed, and that new actions are embarked upon. Yet few are talking about the synapses. ll, missing the point.

The standards that I am currently focusing on are:

• NBIMS : This is what I would call Building Intelligence. Someone once said, “A Cynic knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” Well NBIMS is the cynic in the world of physical assets. It can describe everything, but it does not know what any of them are used for. Still, there is a lot of valuable knowledge embedded in the years of work of the IFC. Many of the objects within their realm actually tie out to things that business owners actually recognize that they bought. I am hoping to use these objects, and their names, in several realms. I am convinced that Building Intelligence is essential to addressing issues of performance and, comfort, and health, and of laying the groundwork for what FIATECH calls “The Self Maintaining, Self-Repairing Facility.
• oBIX: Building Controls are the opposite of NBIMS. They know everything that goes on in the building, but have no idea why. Building controls are detail oriented and process centric, and they expect those who communicate with them to be the same. As it is my home domain, where I work on my day job, am trying to get oBIX to learn from its neighbors. Intelligent Buildings meet Building Intelligence.
• GridWise . GridWise looks to recast power generation, transmission, distribution, and use into separate entities with knowable surfaces. It wants to enable intelligent e-commerce between the above, with no presumptions as to the business models followed. based upon the standards e-Business. It will require formal values-driven ontologies of power that can be consumed and priced in real time by consumer agents. The intelligent grid cannot exist without intelligent buildings.
• Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and Emergency Management. I lump these together not only because they work closely together, but because they both focus on situation awareness. OGC breaks the long-standing GIS model of “Tell me everything (in advance) that you want to know, I will put it all in my database, and let you query it in defined ways. OGC instead says “Geo-tag your sensors and expose them as web services. If I want them on my map I will ask my computer to surf to your server and map them. Google Earth Mash-ups become real time.

Where do we find the systems, the functions, to pull this together. I am a biologist by training, and I often consider how unappreciated is the value of pre-adaption to evolution. Gills could be calcified to become chests and hips. Stubby little fins could attach to calcified gills to support walking on land. Left over degenerative calcified gill structures could become bones of the ear.

In an analogous way, I think the structures discovered at the interface of NBIMS and oBIX become the pre-adaptations for discoverable abstract surfaces for enterprise interactions with buildings, including those of the Intelligent Grid. The intelligent interface that follows becomes the basis for abstract discoverable surfaces. These surfaces enable the development of agents that manage the customer faces of GridWise.

Emergency management wants two-way interaction with engineered systems, both ways probable relying on OGC metadata. Can EM send Distribution Elements to buildings / distribution grids / etc alerting them of current situations? What if I geo-tag my building sensors? What if I geo-tag my Sub-station data. Can sensors in engineered systems provide situational awareness the EM personnel during a situation?

This site is a meant as a mosh pit where these approaches, these domains can slam into one another. By moshing we can create the interactions that will discover the surfaces.

Please, don’t send me emails with your comments. Post your comments below, where it will be more fun for us all.

It's about Growing Up

I have recently gotten a few letters from advocates for one of the many fine existing standards protesting that are already several fine protocols (in each domain) and all we have to do is wrap them in a “ web-service oriented API” and we are done. I think this is fundamentally wrong.

The established control protocols are too detailed. This makes them both too powerful to let into the open, and too difficult to use. An enterprise interface should not require its consumers to have extensive domain-specific knowledge about its inner workings.

Using them for enterprise interactions is far too much like planning an outing with small children. Say one wants to go to the lake:

OK kids, put on your shoes. Katy, where are your shoes. No, those are your Sunday shoes. Margot, you have to use shoes that match. Are your water shoes where you left them on the porch last week? (There’s that domain specific knowledge requirement!) Did anyone pack the sun-screen? Do not sit on the couch to put on sun screen. (Experience as a requestor and knowing, alas, where most of the sun screen will end up) Who put the dog in the car - -dogs are not allowed.

And so it goes.

Instead plan the same trip with some adult friends:

I’ll come by at 7:30 tomorrow. Can you bring the beer? See you then.

I am delighted that the lower level protocols exist. We will always need them to do what they do now. I just don’t want to be required to oversee someone else’s toddlers.

Interface for Enterprise systems need to be abstract, need to occult details, need to reveal surfaces only. Interfaces for internet-scale systems need to be abstract, support appropriate security, defend their mission, and focus on service rather than procedure.

I don’t hate children. I love playing with my own. I even love, for brief periods, playing with those of others. But when I want to get something done, I want to talk to grown-ups.

Beyond Carbon Trading – Toward an Ontology of Power

Lately I’ve been thinking about an ontology for Power Generation. If buying green, and consumer autonomy are ever going to be valued on the markets, we must get beyond a two-dimensional system of Price/Carbon

Yesterday’s New York Times, in the article “Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/weekinreview/29revkin.html) states quite well the concern that today’s Carbon Credits are much more about self image than they are about actually doing anything, well, useful. I love the category “Global Coolness”.

But there is real value here. The question is, how do we realize it?

I think we need an ontology of power generation. There. I’ve written it. As I look at the sentence, it is one of the least plausible sentences I have ever written. But it is important.

As I wrote in a previous post, customers of intelligent buildings, and of the intelligent grid are never going to have a sustained interest in pure efficiency or economy. Look around and see the number of expensive and inefficient decisions that are made every day. We need to get to an place wherein good decisions, aligned with citizen values, can be made by agents.

If the GridWise model develops, and Agents in or for Intelligent Buildings are making on-the-fly power decisions, based upon pricing and availability, and reflecting their owner’s values, we must devise a way to make these agents informed. An Ontology of power needs at least three major dimensions:

• Economics. Price and Availability are essential in any market taxonomy.
• Reliability/Quality of Service. This has many components. I recently listened to a generator describe Just-In-Time (JIT) coal delivery, and how more intimate interactions with the railroad reduced costs. This might be a good thing, but it might also put this generator at risk as a reliable supplier, depending on Labor Relations, Weather, or even some sort of mine catastrophe. An ontology of power needs to delineate the risks.
• Greenliness. This is more than Carbon. What other environmental costs are involved? Do I want to trade three wild-life destructions for one carbon credit? What about water use in an arid area? Are those renewable resources harvested sustainably from farms or from virgin forests? I know an installer of wind turbines who has learned to describe bird kills in terms of fractional cat-years.

I like to imagine the consumer describing his values to the agent in his house, or the third party aggregator acting in his behalf. Either way, that agent buys power on the spot market to meet the consumer’s needs and aspirations.

This would require that each power generator in the market have its attributes published. Selections would vary with time of day and availability. New sources would come onto the market. The agent would only understand how to make the decisions needed because those attributes must fit within the ontology of power.

References:

IUCN and Accounting for Natural Resources http://www.iucn.org/

OASIS Forest Industries TC http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=forest

Euopean Seafood Safety Tracking System